A boy who was driving a kart before he could ride a bike. Four time World Champion before his 27th birthday. The driver who broke Lewis Hamilton's run in Abu Dhabi and built the most dominant season any modern champion has ever had.
Hasselt, and a family built for racing
Max Emilian Verstappen was born on 30/09/1997 in Hasselt, Belgium. He has Dutch nationality through his father. He grew up speaking Dutch and Flemish at home. His father, Jos Verstappen, was a Formula One driver in the 1990s. His mother, Sophie Kumpen, was a top karting driver in the 1980s who beat plenty of future Formula One drivers as a teenager. The boy never had a chance to do anything else.
Jos bought Max his first kart when he was four. The early years were nothing like a normal childhood. The family weekends were race weekends. The family holidays were European karting championship weekends. By seven Max was racing official championships. By 14 he was the European junior champion. By 15 he had won three CIK-FIA titles in a single season, a record nobody has matched.
Sophie was the kind hand at home. Jos was something else. He was a hard, demanding coach who treated his son like a project rather than a child. Max has said the toughness made him. Outsiders watching at the time were less sure.
The petrol station story
The story everyone knows happened at the CIK-FIA KZ2 World Cup in Sarno, Italy in 2012. Max had made a small mistake on track and lost the race. Jos was furious. They started the long drive home through Italy and France. Somewhere on the motorway Jos pulled into a petrol station, told Max to get out, paid for the fuel, and drove off.
The 14 year old was left on a forecourt in another country in the dark. Jos drove for hours before Sophie convinced him to turn around and pick him up. The two of them did not speak for days afterwards. Max has told the story straight in interviews since. He does not romanticise it. He also does not say he wishes it had not happened. He just says it is part of how he learned that mistakes had consequences.
F1 at 17
He went straight from karts into European Formula 3 in 2014. He won 10 races as a rookie. Red Bull's young driver programme signed him in the middle of his Formula 3 season. By the end of it, Toro Rosso had offered him a 2015 Formula One race seat.
He turned 17 in September 2014. He had never raced a Formula One car. He had never raced a Formula 2 car either. The FIA changed the superlicence rules the next year, partly because of him, raising the minimum age to 18. Max was already in. He made his debut at Albert Park, Melbourne, on 15/03/2015. He was 17 years and 166 days old. He is still the youngest driver ever to start a Formula One race. The record cannot be broken now.
Barcelona 2016, the first win
Five races into the 2016 season, Red Bull and Toro Rosso swapped their drivers. Daniil Kvyat was sent down. Max was sent up to Red Bull. His first race as a Red Bull driver was the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona on 15/05/2016. The two Mercedes drivers, Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, took each other out on lap one. Max found himself running second. He held off Kimi Räikkönen for the rest of the race and won.
He was 18 years and 228 days old. He was the youngest race winner the sport had ever had. He was also the first Dutch driver to ever win a Grand Prix. The Netherlands turned orange overnight. Zandvoort was added to the calendar a few years later because of him.
The growing years
The 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons were the years he was learning. He had wins. He had crashes. He had famous arguments with Esteban Ocon and Lance Stroll in the cool down room. The Brazilian Grand Prix 2018 ended in a shoving match in parc fermé that the FIA punished him for with public service work at a karting safety course. He did the work without complaining.
By 2020 he was the team leader at Red Bull, with Alex Albon as his number two. Mercedes were still the team to beat. Hamilton won his seventh title that year and matched Schumacher's all time record. Verstappen finished a distant third in the championship.
2021 was different. Honda had put a new power unit in the back of the Red Bull. The car was finally a match for the Mercedes. Max was 23. He was ready.
2021, lap one to lap 58 of the last race
The title fight ran the whole year. Imola, Silverstone, Monza, Brazil, Saudi Arabia. Every weekend produced an argument. The two of them collided at Silverstone, where Hamilton took the win and Max went to hospital after a 51g impact. They collided again at Monza, where Max's car ended up on top of Hamilton's halo. In Brazil they ran each other off the track at Turn 4 and the stewards did nothing.
Going into the final race at Abu Dhabi the two of them were level on points. Whoever finished higher would be World Champion. Hamilton qualified second behind Max. Hamilton got the better start and led every lap for 57 of the 58 laps. Max was a clear second.
The safety car and the last lap
On lap 53 Nicholas Latifi crashed his Williams. The safety car came out. Mercedes left Hamilton on his old hard tyres. Red Bull pitted Max for fresh softs. Then the race director, Michael Masi, made the calls that turned everything upside down.
He first told the lapped cars between Hamilton and Verstappen to stay where they were. Then, with one lap left, he reversed himself and let only those five lapped cars unlap. Other lapped cars further back were not allowed to. The safety car came in at the end of the lap. Max was right behind Hamilton on fresh soft tyres with one racing lap to go.
Into Turn 5 of the last lap, Max went down the inside. Hamilton had nothing to defend with. Max crossed the line as World Champion. Mercedes protested, twice, on the night. Both protests were dismissed. The trophy stayed in Max's hands.
The FIA investigation later confirmed that the race director had acted outside the rules. They called it "human error" in good faith. They did not change the result. Hamilton has never given an interview to the FIA about it since. He stopped wearing his racing helmet for several months afterwards. Max said only one thing in public, "I won the race on the track."
The dominant years
What followed was a stretch nobody had seen in a generation. 2022 was the year of the new ground effect rules. Red Bull built the RB18 around them. Verstappen won 15 of the 22 races and the second title. 2023 was the season for the record books. He won 19 of 22 races, the most wins in a single season any driver has ever recorded. He had 10 wins in a row at one point.
2024 was harder. McLaren had caught up. Red Bull's car drifted out of the window after the summer break. Lando Norris was on his tail every weekend. Max won fewer races but managed the title with old fashioned defending. He clinched the fourth crown at Las Vegas in November 2024 with two rounds to spare.
Four straight titles. Only Fangio, Schumacher and Hamilton had done that before. He was 27.
2025, the year he had to chase
2025 was different. McLaren had the car. Lando Norris took the title with two rounds left and Max finished as runner up. He still took race wins. He still drove some of the most ruthless laps anyone in the paddock has ever seen. He just did not have the equipment to beat them every weekend. He is the first to say so.
He is back at it in 2026 with the new ruleset, in a new look Red Bull with a Ford-Red Bull Powertrains engine in the back, fighting for a fifth.
Kelly, Lily, and a life off the grid
His public life has always been small. He lives in Monaco. He plays online sim racing seriously, sometimes for 12 hours a day on a race weekend. He runs his own simulator esports team. He has been with Kelly Piquet, daughter of three time World Champion Nelson Piquet, since the start of 2021. She has a daughter called Penelope from a previous relationship. Max has been part of Penelope's life from the start. He and Kelly welcomed their own daughter, Lily, in May 2025.
The change in him since becoming a father is the talk of the paddock. The hard edges have softened. He still races the same way. The post race scrums are different.
What he has left behind so far
He is still racing. The numbers will keep moving. As of June 2026 he stands at 4 World Championships, 62 race wins, 40 pole positions, the all time single season wins record at 19, and the youngest race winner in the history of the sport. He is the only Dutch World Champion the sport has ever had. Two hundred thousand fans in orange caps fill the dunes at Zandvoort every August because of him.
He divides opinion. Some people still cannot forgive the Abu Dhabi finale. Some people think 19 wins in a season is a record that will never be broken. Both can be true.
That is why we talk about him in 2026 the same way the paddock talked about Schumacher in 2004. Not because the story is finished. Because he is in the middle of writing the biggest chapter of his career, and we get to watch it happen.